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Mars rover Curiosity set for first ride on Red Planet's surface

Mars Rover Curiosity is set to take its first drive -- albeit a short one -- Wednesday.

Times science writer Amina Khan discussed anticipation at NASA over Curiosity's first moves on the Mars surface.Khan wrote:

Engineers at
JPL have now tested out the six-wheeled rover’s four steering wheels on
each corner of its body. With the wheels rotating as expected, the NASA
team members say they will be sending commands that will have
the rover move 3 meters forward – about the rover’s length – and then
turn 90 degrees and back up. Curiosity will then get its first look at
its own landing spot. That exercise should take about 30 minutes,
officials said.

In the coming days, the rover
will venture 1,300 feet from its landing site to check out another
interesting spot called Glenelg, a potentially drill-worthy zone where
three types of terrain meet.

With more than 1 million watts of power in each
5-billionths-of-a-second pulse, the laser shots from the ChemCam
instrument vaporized the rock into plasma. The device then used its
spectrometers to analyze the elemental composition.

Like the initial photos taken by Curiosity’s cameras, the laser
exercise was meant to test whether ChemCam was working properly. But
it could also provide some useful scientific insight. If the
composition of the plasma seemed to change over those 30 pulses,
then it could mean the laser was digging into successive layers of
rock with each pulse.